Robert and Rocky ride again at Rackspace

We will give more details about this news today on the Gillmor Gang. That show starts at 3 p.m. Pacific Time. Join us live at http://live.twit.tv or listen to the Gillmor Gang once the recording is up for more. I’ll also be on Ustream’s “Live from the Belmont at SXSW” channel tonight after 7 p.m. Pacific Time too.

When Rackspace told me they were hiring my producer, Rocky, and wanted to hire me too, to build a new kind of community it brought back thoughts of when I was at Microsoft working with Jeff, Charles, Lenn, and a cast of others on Channel 9. That was just a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve been on a whirlwind tour so I could study a bunch of different businesses. I visited a radio station. Facebook. A lonely startup up in Bellingham, Washington that’s now broadcasting live video on the Internet about themselves. Cisco. A coworking facility outside of Seattle which is where iPhone app developer Shazam is located. And quite a few others.

When I was getting a tour of KSCO, a 10,000-watt radio station in Santa Cruz, CA, owner Michael Zwerling showed me the transmission equipment. The brands on that equipment are long forgotten, if you ever knew them, but those companies were vital to pushing our culture and our ability to communicate further.

When I walked into the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver on this tour, and saw tons of people on TweetDeck, I knew we were in the middle of yet another radical shift that would be felt for years into the future (it was this same conference where I first noticed how important the Firefox browser and other social services like Flickr, which was developed in Vancouver, would become back five years ago).

It is pretty clear that the transmission equipment of the modern age is cloud computing. Whether you study Facebook, or Salesforce, or Amazon, you can see the tectonic shifts that are underway in our industry. Look at 12seconds.tv, a small company in Santa Cruz, for instance, just a few miles from those old radio transmission towers, and you see how they are using cloud bursting technology. One of their videos gets popular? Their algorithms move that video over to Amazon and move all the traffic over to Amazon too. This lets them host on their own very inexpensive equipment but protect their service from traffic spikes that occassionally happen.

But forget about the cloud for a moment. Everywhere I look I see other shifts in how we think of the Internet.

Google Latitude showed me that a new kind of location-based service is coming that will get millions of users in just a few days and will lay the bed for a new kind of interaction with your friends and with businesses near you.

Facebook is exploding, seeing 700,000 new users per day. I call Facebook “the velcro” of the Internet because it has so many little hooks to get you involved in that community. I sat next to Randi Zuckerberg at the World Economic Forum as she could ask Facebook’s users a question and get back tens of thousands of responses in just a minute or two. What is happening there is real and is changing everything.

I look at new video communities like Seesmic, that let me interact with people in real time using my webcam. I can post video of a building burning down just as well as just me ranting and raving.

Blogs, too, continue to change and shift. New commenting engines like Disqus or JS-Kit are changing how we can hook up our separate communities together.

Finally we see what’s happening on Twitter and friendfeed and it’s clear that this new world is building the equivilent of a world-wide talk show.

Add all these things up and they got me excited about doing something new.

Why “Building 43?” Well, if you visit Google’s campus, you’ll see that the building that houses their “master plan” is Building 43 (several of its founders sit in building 43 there too). Microsoft has a building 43, too, which is where many of the developers on Windows and other things sit. I always thought that was funny that both companies had a building 43. When I asked friendfeed and Twitter for interesting building 43 stories,http://friendfeed.com/e/1c9e5999-47ed-4e35-b4ba-e66aea424ad8/I-m-collecting-
stories-about-Microsoft-and-Google/ I learned that Google’s numbering system predates it back to when SGI had its headquarters there.

Our “Building 43,” though, is not a place. It’s not even a website. It’s a decentralized community for people fanatical about the Internet. You’ll find us on Facebook, on Twitter, on friendfeed, on Ning, and lots of other places too.

“What about your videos, Scoble?”

You’ll see me continue my videos with companies and people who are fanatical about the Internet. But you’ll also find we’re focusing our cameras on people who build Internet experiences and learn more about how they did it rather than just what they did like I’ve done for the past few years. This is getting back to my roots as well, where I like learning how to build things.

Building 43 will be a lot more than just my videos, though. It’s a community, which means it’s not about me. It’s about you and what you’re trying to build. That will become clearer as we turn on rooms in building 43.

“Why Rackspace?”

When I first met the Rackspace team (they were one of the first interviews I did at Fast Company) I came back and said “Rackspace is one of my favorite companies.” http://scobleizer.com/2008/04/09/my-favorite-company-rackspace/
That’s because they were building their headquarters in a “bad” part of town and had a vision of revitalizing the neighborhood. We are taking that same spirit to the Internet during this tough economic time. By showing more people how to build businesses and have fun on the Internet we’re going to all win.

Rackspace is also one of the few companies in the world that has touchpoints with thousands of other companies. That’s important because I can study how the Internet is changing live and, thanks to these relationships, we can present to you how these sites were built and how you can build the same features into your own business sites and blogs.

So what is “building 43?” We are on the Gillmor Gang where we talked more about what we’re building. You should listen to that and visit http://www.building43.com and sign up to be notified when we turn on the full site.

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Published by Robert Scoble

Chief Strategy Officer at Infinite Retina. https://infiniteretina.com
The Spatial Computing (AR/VR/AI) Agency that helps entrepreneurs with their AR/VR projects and companies.
View all posts by Robert Scoble

Congratulations on the new role, Robert; and much kudos for doing a deal where you can take Rocky with you. Keeping great teams together is a great thing to do, so Rackspace will benefit from that big-time; but it was also a great thing to do from the perspective of being a good person.

Cloud computing is going to be massive in the next couple of years; so it’s going to be a wild ride for you, I’m sure! Look forward to seeing your coverage of the entire cloud computing industry.

Congratulations on the new role, Robert; and much kudos for doing a deal where you can take Rocky with you. Keeping great teams together is a great thing to do, so Rackspace will benefit from that big-time; but it was also a great thing to do from the perspective of being a good person.

Cloud computing is going to be massive in the next couple of years; so it’s going to be a wild ride for you, I’m sure! Look forward to seeing your coverage of the entire cloud computing industry.

congratulations on your new gig Robert. Nice talking with you at Northern Voice.

Are you also going to talk about green technology at Building43?

Will you cover technology & politics?

If you are here’s a story you might be interested in by one of my coaching clients who’s an IT consultant. She used flickr to expose how a US senator left his website directories open to everyone including a database that was eventually found out to contain confidential donor information of thousands of people.

congratulations on your new gig Robert. Nice talking with you at Northern Voice.

Are you also going to talk about green technology at Building43?

Will you cover technology & politics?

If you are here’s a story you might be interested in by one of my coaching clients who’s an IT consultant. She used flickr to expose how a US senator left his website directories open to everyone including a database that was eventually found out to contain confidential donor information of thousands of people.

CEO of a large corporate software monopoly headhunts the genius from a garage start-up and has him develop Synapse – the worldwide media distribution network that is supposed to launch from Building 21 and take over the world, but instead gets released as open source and brings down the evil software villan. [AntiTRUST movie]

Large corporate internet company hires the genius Rocky and Robert and has them … do something with the worldwide media distribution network … from Building 43 and take over the world …. [Real life]

CEO of a large corporate software monopoly headhunts the genius from a garage start-up and has him develop Synapse – the worldwide media distribution network that is supposed to launch from Building 21 and take over the world, but instead gets released as open source and brings down the evil software villan. [AntiTRUST movie]

Large corporate internet company hires the genius Rocky and Robert and has them … do something with the worldwide media distribution network … from Building 43 and take over the world …. [Real life]

Hey Robert! This sounds like a great thing and a really great fit for someone like you. I think what I have built here with Phreadz [http://phreadz.com] could also fit with what you’re doing pretty well in quite a few ways – being ‘fanatical about the web’.
I’ll drop you a line somewhere and fill you in. Who knows? You might see the fit too? 🙂
Best of luck!
kosso

Hey Robert! This sounds like a great thing and a really great fit for someone like you. I think what I have built here with Phreadz [http://phreadz.com] could also fit with what you’re doing pretty well in quite a few ways – being ‘fanatical about the web’.
I’ll drop you a line somewhere and fill you in. Who knows? You might see the fit too? 🙂
Best of luck!
kosso

great chatting with you briefly at northern voice 2009 during the rob cottingham / nancy white keynote

i could be wrong but i don’t think adobe air even with tweetdeck will become a dominant platform for apps! as for tweetdeck, tweetgrid and others are already doing it in more lightweight and portable style

great chatting with you briefly at northern voice 2009 during the rob cottingham / nancy white keynote

i could be wrong but i don’t think adobe air even with tweetdeck will become a dominant platform for apps! as for tweetdeck, tweetgrid and others are already doing it in more lightweight and portable style

Great to hear about your new gig Robert. I like that you’re going to be applying your prolific listening and interacting abilities to a business. And cloud computing is a sector that will benefit from the Scobleizer energy and perspective. Looking forward to what lies ahead.

Great to hear about your new gig Robert. I like that you’re going to be applying your prolific listening and interacting abilities to a business. And cloud computing is a sector that will benefit from the Scobleizer energy and perspective. Looking forward to what lies ahead.

Congratulations on the new role, Robert; and much kudos for doing a deal where you can take Rocky with you. Keeping great teams together is a great thing to do, so Rackspace will benefit from that big-time; but it was also a great thing to do from the perspective of being a good person.

Congratulations on the new role, Robert; and much kudos for doing a deal where you can take Rocky with you. Keeping great teams together is a great thing to do, so Rackspace will benefit from that big-time; but it was also a great thing to do from the perspective of being a good person.

Building 43 is a community – what’s the business model? Or is the purpose to promote RackSpace?
Maybe RackSpace needs Scoble more than Scoble needs RackSpace.
Amazon Web Services is the challenger in the market.

Building 43 is a community – what’s the business model? Or is the purpose to promote RackSpace?
Maybe RackSpace needs Scoble more than Scoble needs RackSpace.
Amazon Web Services is the challenger in the market.

Engago: the business model is to get more businesses doing more things on the Internet. If we succeed in that then everyone gets more business, including Rackspace, which will win its share of Internet hosting competitions.

Engago: the business model is to get more businesses doing more things on the Internet. If we succeed in that then everyone gets more business, including Rackspace, which will win its share of Internet hosting competitions.

I enjoyed this article very much for it goes over the positive aspect that technology brings to our Society. There is nothing wrong with new scientific or technologic innovations as long as we use it for good things and thus far it looks like we are having more excellent dialogues, radio communication and great two-way conversations. These dialogues, blogs, social networks, videos, business, political and citizen journalism may very well one of the answers so that we could creatively forge a better society for all. Santa Cruz is an a great place for entrepreneurs and the sharing of new ideas. Its not a surprise to see more community projects developing in that area of the United States.

I enjoyed this article very much for it goes over the positive aspect that technology brings to our Society. There is nothing wrong with new scientific or technologic innovations as long as we use it for good things and thus far it looks like we are having more excellent dialogues, radio communication and great two-way conversations. These dialogues, blogs, social networks, videos, business, political and citizen journalism may very well one of the answers so that we could creatively forge a better society for all. Santa Cruz is an a great place for entrepreneurs and the sharing of new ideas. Its not a surprise to see more community projects developing in that area of the United States.

“the business model is to get more businesses doing more things on the Internet. If we succeed in that then everyone gets more business, including Rackspace, which will win its share of Internet hosting competitions.”

Hate to break it to you, but that isn’t close to being a business model. You apparently, or maybe obviously?, have no P&L plan. Nowhere in your plan do you explain how Rackspace will make money from your heretofore money-sucking adventures. And in this economy, how you will make money is clearly the most important aspect of any business plan.

What you describe is some high level strategy. And a fairly generic one at that. You apparently have no quantitative way of measuring how you will be successful.

If I were management at Rackspace, it’s at this point I would start worrying if I were going to end up throwing money down a rathole in order to satisfy some web nerd’s ego. If you are serious about thinking you have a viable business model, you need to show at what point your “strategy” starts turning into money. For example, how many unwatchable videos will result in new business for RackSpace? 1:1, 10:1, 100:1? Again, if you have no clue, the you better assume RackSpace will eventually want an answer that justifies your existence. Seems this is what happened at FastCompany. Your globetrotting and lame video making wasn’t generating enough income to off set your expenses.

“the business model is to get more businesses doing more things on the Internet. If we succeed in that then everyone gets more business, including Rackspace, which will win its share of Internet hosting competitions.”

Hate to break it to you, but that isn’t close to being a business model. You apparently, or maybe obviously?, have no P&L plan. Nowhere in your plan do you explain how Rackspace will make money from your heretofore money-sucking adventures. And in this economy, how you will make money is clearly the most important aspect of any business plan.

What you describe is some high level strategy. And a fairly generic one at that. You apparently have no quantitative way of measuring how you will be successful.

If I were management at Rackspace, it’s at this point I would start worrying if I were going to end up throwing money down a rathole in order to satisfy some web nerd’s ego. If you are serious about thinking you have a viable business model, you need to show at what point your “strategy” starts turning into money. For example, how many unwatchable videos will result in new business for RackSpace? 1:1, 10:1, 100:1? Again, if you have no clue, the you better assume RackSpace will eventually want an answer that justifies your existence. Seems this is what happened at FastCompany. Your globetrotting and lame video making wasn’t generating enough income to off set your expenses.

Rackspace has some room to grow in the main development market of servers, a good friend bought a rack from theme , co-located for a fitness site (muscle main or something like that) and never had it set up right. steroids

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